UW-River Falls is small enough to care about the individual, but big enough to attract good teachers like Goerke and Mahanna — they were passionate about what they taught and knew how to have fun doing it.

– Andy Carlson 1983

Principles of Nutrition is the course that changed by career path and led me to work at Land O’Lakes Purina Animal Nutrition, and Advanced Dairy Management is the course that led me back to the farm.

Another flashback from the past – here’s Pam Jahnke from her days at UWRF where she started the first ever Farm Show on WRFW, the campus radio station. Pam, aka the Fabulous Farm Babe, is the Farm Director for WI Farm Report Radio and her agribusiness updates are carried daily on stations across the state. See more about Pam here.

The annual Wisconsin Crops Management Conference is just around the corner, so a crops related memory seems appropriate. If our records are correct this is a photo from the 1981 Invitational Crops Show. Do you remember judging silage or selecting the longest ear of corn? We’re sure Lou Greub and Steve Carlson are somewhere in the room…but can you identify the students?

1990: Academic Quadrathlon Coordinators Tony Jilek and Dennis Cooper work with students: Tiffany Julen, Dan Smerchek, Rob Moede and Tom Hansen. AQ is a recurring event that happens in the spring where UW-River Falls student teams compete with each other to show their all-around knowledge of species, animal care products, animal health and other animal science topics. The top team on campus goes on to compete at the Midwest regional competition at the American Society of Animal Science meeting in March.

We in the College are going through our collection of old photos too! Here are two from 1985 featuring faculty members Terry Ferriss, “Doc” Bohn, and several unidentified students. Recognize any of them? By what is evident in the photo of the engines lab, it looks like it might have been taken at the annual lawnmower tune-up event, which still happens each spring! Any stories surrounding working that event?

As part of the history project within the College, faculty and staff shared some of their memories…

Sometime in the 1980s, in an attempt to allay mass symptoms of winter blues among the faculty, Bob Baker and Marv Thompson invented a gourd rolling contest and organized a college-wide event. Marv even donned a striped referee’s shirt to officiate the event. Contestants were to roll a gourd as far as they could in a straight line, challenged of course by the slightly curved stems of the gourds.